Cockle Do

The rumors aren't true, she says. There is no impending Rooster ruckus. Rooster owners Toddand Amanda Tracy have not put their roughly 4-year-old restaurant on the block, which for a Rooster is a very serious matter. Instead, Amanda Tracy says they're just a week or so shy of breaking ground on a new, plumper fowl in Southlake, one they hope will soak up some of the pent-up dining demand roiling in that bedroom community. The new Rooster will be architecturally similar to the current model at Oak Grove and Lemmon avenues when it opens in the summer of 2001. Their restaurant is named for the rooster art accumulated by chef David Burdette and general manager Cameron Morris, both onetime partners in the restaurant before they severed from the bird to start other projects.

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Mixed Hash:The M Crowd Restaurant Group, Mico Rodriguez's phenomenally successful restaurant company that spawned such nosh nooks as Mi Cocina, The Mercury, and Citizen, is bifurcating into two distinct divisions. Chef/partner Chris Ward will direct a new division called The Restaurant Life which will include the Mercury, Citizen, and Ellington's Southern Chop House in Fort Worth plus the upcoming Paris Vendome and Barumba (billed as a subterranean Latin restaurant) Ward says Rodriguez will continue to develop Mi Cocina and Taco Diner under the M Crowd umbrella...Do-it-yourself Mongolian barbecue mogul Jeff Sinelli is aggressively propagating his Genghis Grill restaurants. After opening the first Genghis Grill on Greenville Avenue a couple of years ago, with an Addison extension rooted sometime later, Sinelli is birthing two new Genghis Grills: one in Fort Worth in the Trinity Commons shopping center, which is scheduled to open in late November, and another in Southlake with a March opening date. Not only that, but Sinelli is drafting plans to open as many as 10 Dallas-area Genghis Grills with eyes on Frisco, Plano, and Arlington. From there he hopes to infect Austin and Houston. So far, Sinelli boasts that he has been able to feed his expansion exclusively through cash flow. "Right now, I'm still flying solo," he says...It's been lots of things over the years: Crazy Charlie's, Virago, O'Leary's. The space on Lower Greenville Avenue is a thing called Rear Window, a sort of a new American gut-gasket garage tooled with buffalo wings, steak cheddar fries, onion rings, pizzas, and burgers. Rear Window is the brainchild of onetime Fairmont hotel beverage manager Jack Freehan, who was once affiliated with the Old London Tavern.